THE RECORD

November 27, 1996

BACK TO THE EGG

Suzanne Trevis

I was four and a half years old when preschool classes opened in the rear of what is now the Christian Fellowship Church. In the beginning the building served as everything, community hall, post office and store. And in the spring of 1968 the village hired Mrs. Elsie Pope and started the first preschool.

I was always rather proud of the fact that I started out here in the first preschool program and continued on to be one of the first students to complete their entire education in Gold River.

I have a lot of good memories in that building. From brownies and guides to the big wooden book bin in the kids room at the library. Saturday afternoon matinees where a dollar would get you in and buy all your goodies with change to spare. Fighting over who would get to play the piano before a grownup came back and told us to leave it alone (like you couldn't hear it all over the building!).

In all honesty I don't think too many of the playschool memories come from the spring of '68 but from later, when my mother began to work there.

She started as an assistant with Mrs. Pope in 1972. There were a lot of jokes about a playschool run by two women named Pope and Lord. It got even funnier when they turned the building into a church, but I digress.

I remember helping out a lot, picking up the cardboard "bricks", helping to hand out colouring pictures copied on the old mimeograph machine and those big fat hexagonal wax crayons. Singing silly songs with the kids. Making fat, lumpy people out of homemade playdough. We'd practice numbers and letters and learned a lot about sharing and how to get along.

Well things change and kids grow up. The preschool program moved to the arena then the aquatic centre and finally to the Jack Christensen Centre. I remember my Mom getting all weepy when "her kids" started graduating from high school. Time sure flies.

I have kids of my own in the school system now. And they all started out in preschool and/or daycare. They go on field trips to exciting places 'round town, they learn sign language and rules of the road, they do enough crafts to supply all the grandparents, aunts & uncles you could possibly have (where do they get all those good ideas?) But most importantly, they have fun.